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Larry Speakes, seen here with President Reagan, called the press secretary
"the second most visible person in the country." (NARA, Ronald Reagan Library)

At the November 1985 U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in Geneva, White House spokesman
Larry Speakes believed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was getting the better
of President Ronald Reagan in his give-and-take with reporters. Speakes then had
an aide draft some quotes, polished them up, and told reporters that they were
things the President had said. One was, "The world breathes easier because we
are talking together." Another was, "Our differences are serious, but so is our
commitment to improving understanding." Both quotes were used extensively in the
news media and attributed to the President. He did not say either one of them.

It might be argued that it doesn't matter. Who cares? The statements were hardly earth-shaking. Speakes dismissed them as "taking a bit of liberty with my P.R. man's license" in order
to "spruce up the President's image."18 The trouble with this argument is that nobody had
given Larry Speakes a publicity man's license. He had been given an obligation to deal honestly
with the press and public.

By no means do all of the words that pour forth under the President's name originate with
the President. Skilled writers craft his speeches, bureaucrats draft his veto messages, and
diplomats painstakingly construct his statements during visits of foreign leaders. These, however,
are adopted by the President and become his utterances. Speakes did not even consult Reagan.
Reporters believed what they were told and reported that Reagan had said things he could not
even have known about. If Speakes had not written about the incident in his memoirs, the
quotations could have made their way from newspaper files into history books. Conceivably,
they could still. The conflict was not between the press secretary's obligation to the press and his
obligation to the national interest and the saving of lives. It was between his obligation to the
press and, and as Speakes put it, sprucing up the President's image. Image-making won.19

Presidential press secretaries do not, of course, tell stories designed to put the President in
a bad light. During the Yalta conference near the end of World War II, Acting Press Secretary
Jonathan Daniels went through the pictures taken by Army Signal Corps photographers and
released those that showed President Roosevelt looking relatively healthy. When he later was
criticized, he conceded that to some extent he misled the American people as to the President's
health but added, "I wasn't going to make him look like he was dying."20

This sounds reasonable. No censorship of the press was involved, because the pictures
were not taken by news photographers but by government employees. There is, however, still a
question of truthfulness. The President was dying. The conference ended on February 11, 1945,
and Roosevelt died almost exactly two months later of heart disease from which he had long
suffered. It is a close question whether Daniels was, in effect, lying to the press. But it should be
noted that there was no faking of pictures, only a selection. Most of us, if we have a chance to
select among photographs taken of us, will select the ones that make us look best. There were, of
course, larger issues involved here. It might have been better had all the pictures been made
public, but it seems a bit too much to expect.

It is not too much to expect that the presidential press secretary to tell the truth, if not the
whole truth. Hoover's Theodore Joslin once lamented, "I sometimes wonder whether I ever will
be able to tell the whole truth after serving through this position."21

It is an odd position. Larry Speakes said its occupant is "the second most visible person in
the country, which can be not only an honor but a headache."22 President Johnson's George
Reedy said, "The only reason for the press secretary's job is that the President cannot deal with
the press 24 hours a day. You have to have somebody that acts as a stand-in for him."23 Jody
Powell, after discussing his experiences in the position, said, "I have been speaking of the press
secretary's job as though there were general agreement on what it is. That is not the case."24

What, then, are the qualifications for this peculiar assignment?

Charlie Ross was a high school friend of Harry Truman's. When Ross spoke to the
press, they knew he was speaking for the President. (NARA, Harry S. Truman Library)

In 1931 Charles G. Ross of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote, "My advice
to all Presidents is not to put up a newspaper man to meet the press. Choose a
politician. . . . Newspaper men expect a former colleague to deal with them on
their own terms. When he doesn't--and often he can't--they are resentful. On the
contrary, they expect only the average amount of assistance from a presidential
secretary who has not had newspaper training."25

Fourteen years later, President Truman called upon Ross to be his press secretary. Charlie
Ross was about to prove himself wrong.

Ross has been criticized as a press secretary on many counts. He lacked much
administrative experience, and the press office he ran was by no means a tight ship. He was not
always aware of everything that was going on.26 His career in journalism had been spent as an
editorial page editor and a writer of long, thoughtful essays, and he seemed not to understand the
highly competitive spot news reporting that is the staple of the White House beat.27 He failed
to coordinate news releases with the government departments and agencies.28 He did not do
much to burnish Truman's image and, as Truman biographer Alonzo Hamby has pointed out, it
probably never occurred to him that this was part of his job.29 On top of all this, he was hard to
hear.30

But Ross had two advantages that are important in a presidential press secretary. He was
very close to President Truman. They had been high school friends in Independence, Missouri,
and had renewed their friendship after Truman came to Washington as a senator. When Ross
spoke to reporters--either for the record on background--they could know that he was speaking
for the President. And perhaps more important, few if any reporters ever complained that Charlie
Ross misled them.

As Theodore Joslin observed, a President's press secretary cannot always be
expected to tell the whole truth. But he or she should be expected to tell nothing
but the truth.

This essay is based on talks given by Mr. Nelson at the National Archives Building in
Washington, D.C., on September 10, 1998, and at the Carter Center in Atlanta on February 23,
1997, on his book, Who Speaks for the President? The White House Press Secretary from
Cleveland to Clinton (Syracuse University Press, 1998). The National Archives and Records
Administration schedules author lectures throughout the year.